Sunday, January 23, 2011

TowerStream is Marketing 4G

TowerStream is a sponsor of 4GWE in Miami Beach on Feb. 2. They are advertising 5 Mbps of Internet Bandwidth for $500 with free install and 1st and last months free on a 2 year contract. TowerStream emphasizes that it is Symmetric bandwidth, which makes me wonder how 4G ties in.

On their website, they advertise 8 Mbps for $799 on a 2 year with fee install within 5 days. Service guarantee includes 99.99% (4 nines) uptime and less than 1% packet loss. It's available in 11 markets including New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, Miami, Seattle, Dallas/Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Nashville, and the greater Providence area where the Company is based. I'm just lost on the "4G technology" part of the advertising.

Recently, analysts have been claiming that with the big 4 cellcos all fighting over who has the fastest network, they are neglecting the important thing: customers don't care because in their experience it's all lies. One analyst mentioned that Ma Bell should put more money into its voice (GSM) network to ensure less dropped calls instead of spending the whole $5B per year on data build out.

Another analyst asked why cell phone voice quality is so crappy STILL and why didn't any of the carriers implement HD Voice yet. These are good questions until you realize that most of these companies are run by clowns who grew up in the system. Bell-Heads.

FYI: T-Mobile USA gets orders to grow revenue, cut cost. <- They have to be told that?! See what I mean about Bell-Heads?!

Hey, maybe they can't improve the call quality. Even the handset manufacturers don't improve the call quality any more. It's all about the other stuff it will do - camera, keyboard, touchscreen. The first cellco that gets it will likely take market share because Boomers are a BIG portion of the population with spending money and they don't need all the gadgets so much as they need voice. That flies in the face of the Millennials who avoid voice for texting but Boomers have more $$$.

Take aways:

Who is your market place? Boomers or Millenials?

Do you have an SLA to advertise? What kind of guarantee do you offer your customers and prospects?

BTW, Carlson Wireless has the first White Spaces radio out. This after the FCC decides to auction off up to 120 MHz of TV spectrum for mobile broadband.

No comments: